Wald Abraham 1902 1950 (5 results)

Hardcover. Second edition. Octavo, ix, 179 pages. In Good plus condition.Spine is green with black print. Boards in green cloth. Light shelf wear. Text block has name in pencil on front flyleaf. NOTE: Shelved in Netdesk Column C. 1376044. FP New Rockville Stock.

Paperback. Condition: Near Fine condition. Reprint of the 1947 edition. New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1973. 5.25" wide by 8.5" tall. A bright, shiny, clean, square, tight copy. No store stamp, owner's name or bookplate. Pages are unmarked. No underlining. No highlighting. No margin notes. Flat, uncreased spine. Contains a Preface, and many chapters arranged into 3 major parts: I) General Theory; II) Application of the General Theory to Special Cases; III) The Problem of Multi-Valued Decisions and Estimation. Detailed Appendix (pp. 157-207). Index. Bound in the original blue pictorial wraps. Quality softcover binding, with pages that are sewn (not glued) for many years of use. From the DSB (volume 14, pp. 121-123): "Most, although not all, of [Wald's] results were summed up in SEQUENTIAL ANALYSIS (1947). With minor exceptions, the entire contents of this book were obtained by him. Such a phenomenon is rare in mathematical books and indicates the extent to which he founded and dominated the field of sequential analysis.". Reprint of the 1947 edition. Trade Paperback. Near Fine condition. xii, 212pp. + 15 page publisher's catalogue.

Hardcover. Condition: Very Good. No Jacket. 1st Edition. First Edition. ix, 179 pp. Original cloth. Very Good, without dust jacket.

Hardcover. Condition: Very Good. No Jacket. 1st Edition. FIRST EDITION. viii, 140 pp. Cloth-backed boards, with original printed front wrapper bound in. Ink stamp on each side of title page. Very Good. Chapter 1 translated as Calculation and Elimination of Seasonal Fluctuations, Chapter 12 in David F. Hendry & Mary S. Morgan, The Foundations of Econometric Analysis, Cambridge University Press, 1995, pp. 175-9. 'Wald was perceptive in discussing the difficulties of identifying time-series components and proving correspondences between economic categories and the mathematically determined components hidden in the time-series data. These difficulties are part of the reason that time-series methods declined in the 1930s. . . . The time-series programme of decomposition, though it dealt in economic categories, was primarily empiricist in outlook, while the growing econometric movement of the 1930s was committed to the introduction of more theoretical models' (Hendry & Morgan, p. 16). 'Eventually Wald got a position as a consultant in the Austrian Institute for Business Cycle Research, which then was headed by Oskar Morgenstern. Morgenstern acquainted him with the problem of seasonal adjustment of time series thus starting off Wald's first genuinely statistical contribution. When the Institute applied a then popular method of Person's to the series of unemployment data, the result was plainly wrong. The allegedly adjusted series did not only not eliminate seasonal variations, it even turned them to an opposite seasonal movement. Wald was able to show that Person's method only worked correctly if the seasonal pattern was invariant over time. However, with a slowly changing seasonal pattern results such as those observed could easily turn up. . . . In his book 'Berechnung und Ausschaltung von Saisonschwankungen' (1936), Wald explains in depth every single step of this procedure and carefully accounts for the various approximations that appear along the line of calculations' (Hans Schneeweiss, 'Abraham Wald', lecture presented at the 54th Session of the International Statistical Institute in Berlin, August 13-20, 2003).

Hardcover. Condition: Very Good. No Jacket. 1st Edition. Contemporary cloth; Volumes X-XIV 'L. H.' stamped in gilt on spines. Volumes VIII, XVI ex-Royal Statistical Society. Very Good. These volumes include 20 papers by Wald, 19 of which are among the first 27 papers reprinted in Wald's Selected Papers in Statistics and Probability (1955) [a copy of which is included with the group]. 'Wald's most important work . . . was in statistics. Wolfowitz, who was first his student, then his colleague and collaborator, described a paper Wald published in the Annals of Mathematical Statistics in 1939 as 'probably Wald's most important single paper' (J Wolfowitz, 'Abraham Wald, 1902-1950', Ann. Math. Statistics 23 (1952), 1-13). In this 1939 paper Wald 'points out that the two major problems of statistical theory at that time, testing hypotheses and estimation, can both be regarded as simple special cases of a more general problem - known nowadays as a 'statistical decision problem'. . . . He defines loss functions, risk functions, a priori distributions, Bayes decision rules, admissible decision rules, and minimax decision rules, and proves that a minimax decision rule has a constant risk under certain regularity conditions' (L. Weiss, 'Abraham Wald', in N. L. Johnson and S. Kotz, eds., Leading personalities in statistical sciences, New York, 1997, pp. 164-7). Wald's 'Sequential tests of statistical hypotheses,' (Annals Math. Stat., Vol. 16 (1945), pp. 117-186) is reprinted in Kotz & Johnson's Breakthroughs in Statistics, beginning at p. 256.